The St. Regis Aspen Resort

The St. Regis Aspen Resort

You arrive at the foot of Aspen Mountain, which everyone in town still calls Ajax, on East Dean Street a short walk from the Silver Queen Gondola and two blocks from the pedestrian core, about fifteen minutes from Aspen/Pitkin County Airport and four hours by road from Denver. The building is a large Colorado redbrick block over five floors that opened in 1992 as a Ritz-Carlton and took the St. Regis name in 1998, the first hotel outside John Jacob Astor’s 1904 New York original to carry it. There are 179 rooms and suites, which makes it the largest luxury hotel in a town that otherwise keeps things small, arranged around a fountain courtyard that looks straight up the mountain. Starwood sold it in 2010 to OptAsia Capital, the Bangkok firm of Thosapong Jaruthavee, who had stayed as a guest and decided to buy the place, and Marriott still runs it under a long management contract, with Heather Steenge-Hart as general manager. The interiors come largely from Lauren Rottet’s $40 million redesign, completed in 2012, which took the Gilded Age as its reference in a nod to Astor’s Manhattan, with Aspen architects Sarah Broughton and John Rowland working on the remodel and a further refresh in 2023. Bathrooms were rebuilt with separate showers and freestanding tubs, beds are wrapped in leather, and suites come with the brand’s butler service. Velvet Buck, the main restaurant, is named for the velvet on a young stag’s antlers and cooks in the spirit of the 1800s Rocky Mountain settlers, local meat, open-fire techniques, leather placemats, thirty-odd whiskies. Mountain Social is the bar for après, outside restaurants take winter residencies (Marea, with a menu by PJ Calapa, was the most recent), and the Remède Spa, added in 2004, has 16 treatment rooms beside a heated outdoor pool. This is a grand hotel in the old sense, built for scale and ceremony, and it does the brand rituals, the nightly champagne sabering, the butlers, with complete seriousness. It suits families who need connecting rooms and multi-bedroom suites, groups who want everyone under one roof, and travellers who want a ski morning and a dinner reservation within the same short walk. The location is the strongest argument for it, close enough to the gondola that you can be on the mountain without a car or a shuttle, and close enough to town that you never think about how you will get back. You should not come if you want a twenty-room lodge where the staff know your name by the second morning, if you want to clip into your skis at the front door, or if a 9,000-square-foot ballroom and the conference guests it brings would spoil your evening. You should come if you value a building that runs like a machine, a suite with someone to unpack it for you, and the shortest possible distance between Ajax, the spa, and a seat at the bar. The short version: A 179-room grand hotel at the base of Aspen Mountain, opened in 1992 as a Ritz-Carlton and redesigned by Lauren Rottet in 2012 with Gilded Age references, a short walk from the Silver Queen Gondola and Aspen’s pedestrian core.